Cynan Jones: ‘The chances of making money writing are very slim’
The Welsh novelist on badger baiting, being British and the wine and flower shop he runsWelsh author Cynan Jones won a Betty Trask award for his first novel, The Long Dry. His second book, Everything I Found on the Beach, was published last s...
A voyage round Agatha Christie
Would the queen of crime have written her books if she hadn't been abandoned by her husband? Joanna Moorhead meets the writer's grandsonIf there lurks anywhere in an Agatha Christie novel a small boy, perhaps one who enjoys tennis or cricket and loves ...
A voyage round Agatha Christie
Would the queen of crime have written her books if she hadn't been abandoned by her husband? Joanna Moorhead meets the writer's grandsonIf there lurks anywhere in an Agatha Christie novel a small boy, perhaps one who enjoys tennis or cricket and loves ...
Q&A: Prue Leith
'My greatest fear? Senility. My mother and grandmother both went off with the fairies'Prue Leith, 72, was born in South Africa. In the early 1960s, she moved to London where she set up a catering firm; she went on to open Leith's Restaurant and Leith'...
Derek Walcott: ‘The Oxford poetry job would have been too much work’
As his reworking of Robinson Crusoe goes on stage, Derek Walcott talks about Caribbean culture, his spat with VS Naipaul - and why he didn't want the poetry job anywayThe battle to become Oxford professor of poetry in 2009 was worthy of a mock-heroic p...
Belle de Jour v Julie Bindel
Brooke Magnanti has swapped her call girl blog for an academic study of the sex industry. I disagree with just about everything she has to sayI meet Brooke Magnanti at a hotel in London's King's Cross, close to the notorious street prostitution scene a...
Small Press Spotlight: Douglas Ray
Author Photo: Jane Rule Burdine
He Will Laugh, Lethe Press, 2012.
Douglas Ray, a 2010 Lambda Literary Foundation poetry fellow, teaches at Indian Springs School, a boarding and day school in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his B.A. and M.F....
Gatz: The greater Gatsby
A performance of every word of F Scott Fitzgerald's jazz era classic, Gatz lasts a marathon eight hours (with a break for dinner). How do the actors manage it?On paper it looks like punishment: an eight-hour stage production (albeit with a dinner ...
Georgia Gould: my father’s good life and death
Georgia Gould, the daughter of New Labour grandee Philip Gould, who died last year, talks about the inspiration of his final daysThe night before I go to meet Georgia Gould, I've been up very late reading the book her father, Philip, wrote in the month...
Michael Frayn: ‘I’m never going to write anything again…’
…but that's what the veteran playwright and novelist always says. And his latest novel, a laugh-out-loud farce set on a Greek island, gives no hint of being his last wordReviewers will often say a book made them laugh out loud, when what they mean
A life in writing: Jackie Kay
'I think the short story suits people who feel displaced or misplaced or who don't fit in, people who feel their very bones are lonely'Life can go either way, for the people in Jackie Kay's stories. They can be miserable, lonely and pretty despera...
Laurent Binet: ‘Most French writers are lazy’
The award-winning author of HhhH on his literary Nazi hunt, having his debut novel hailed as a masterpiece by Bret Easton Ellis, and why he wants change at the Elysée PalaceA thrilling and formally daring novel about the plan to assassinate the high-r...
